


D. E. A. D.

by The Drunk Accountant (The_Divine_Fool)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fear, Language, Love/Hate, Magical Realism, Psychological Drama, Satire, Science Fiction, Supernatural Elements, Surreal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:40:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24362938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Divine_Fool/pseuds/The%20Drunk%20Accountant
Summary: The Wolds, one core world and nine worm-eaten satellites stuck in the folds of the Far-3 Kiloparsec Arm; a society whittled and whelked under cycles of attack and resistance. In a single lifetime, witness great empires, fragile democracies, cat-eared agents of apartheid and sun-thrashed interlunar monopolies; everything that rises in the Wolds must fall.From an untidy tremblor of time a dictator surfaces behind a blank face, forever-smiling. An entire population sinks under the thrall of one individual's morbid fancies...A transdimensional doctor, a beautiful songstress, a dispossessed soldier, and a madman. This is a story about finding happiness walking in reverse.
Kudos: 4





	1. The End (prelude)

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record  
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;  
**Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne**  
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,  
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.  
~James Russell Lowell, 'The Present Crisis'

###### 

Mangroves felt the truth crushed to his feet. He choked wretchedly on the self-pitying thought that clamored through his head: it's not my fault. It was most certainly his fault. But no matter how high he dammed the thundering wave of regret, its scatter-clap echoes rang, ranging ruthless inside his skull, undiminished by his ownership of fault. What was the point, anyway? He caused this. He knew this would happen -- he understood his allies' brute ambitions, so what use was there for this reactive emotional noise? Mangroves watched a violet stormswell of blood begin its unharried journey over the black and white tile. _Black and white, black-and-white,_ he finched, _why is this whole blasted palace_ black and white? Achromatic tile, floor-mounted marble and alabaster sculptures, a shattered blanket of glass like sanding sugar. Centuries of ambivalence yielded to the creeping color of passion in a matter of seconds; fractions of seconds, ticking by like elevator numbers before his eyes.

 _I didn't mean it._ Red now. All red.

Even in the flurry of activity following the tyrant's collapse, Mangroves felt indifferent to the rebels and their victory. Time twisted on its thorny stem behind the skin of his forehead, snagging at the garden-gate place between his eyes that still felt the phantom touch of a friend -- and the numbers ticked down. Ruby red vomited over the gray and white wrinkles of his cepheid brain, slowly but surely spilling ink into every neural canyon, filling every private cavity to the brim with hatred and loss. _I didn't mean this._ Time, a thoughtless flock of numbers tapping their toes behind his eyes, adrenalin on the drums, shock and horror in the cheap-seats. Mangroves withdrew; maybe, he could pretend like the regret wasn't his.

One knee plunged in red, then the other. The rebel faction had trussed him in a stab-proof vest and flak jacket, and he could barely move his arms. Trapped like a rat in a lab coat. Which, he supposed, summed up this entire lifetime to date: a victim wearing the jagged fate of his oppressor, conditioned to smile and dance -- underneath the combat gear, Mangroves' white collared shirt cinched tight against his shoulders. 

A memory unfolded behind his eyes. It was another lazy, cool afternoon in the facility, and he was sifting through paperwork during swim hour. And there was Patient #126, a bundle of ribs and stilled breath at his feet.

The doctor pulled his former patient's head into his lap, noticed the unlovely paleness of 126's exposed arms, the webs of blue and green, reddened fingertips loosely curled around the handle of a revolver. He wondered if he was the only one who thought of the tyrant as a skeletal thing. The face of the ruling party was cloaked in its usual costume, stiff planes and pylons of dark Kevlar beneath a shifting black shroud and that horrible, grinning mask. In fragments of exposed skin like shrapnel Mangroves reconstructed the image of his unlovely patient, a child, still, more sick and defensive than ever before. Mangroves realized he was doing it again, mesmerizing himself with satellite features to avoid the inevitable end. Except this time he was afraid that end would never come; he would never glimpse the hideous strength in those dogwood gray eyes ever again.

And yet...  
Remarkably, they still peered up at him through the gaping orbits of the porcelain mask.  
There was a faint bubbling sound as air hissed through the red bullet hole in his patient's neck, just left of a pale bobbing Adam's apple polished in candy red.

“I didn't want this.” He spoke, finally. A decibel meant for the ears of the dead and dying. Mortality ensnared his conscious mind and drove it to bitter ends: he felt guilt, for the part he played, anger at the ones who orchestrated the ku, regret for the monster his patient became. Grief for a fallen friend.

He itched to tear off the mask, to see how time had turned the unlovely features he once cataloged day and night, wondered if such an act would mar his memory of what 126 once was or if it would reinforce everything he'd already known. At length he decided against it, absurdly, for the sake of privacy, knowing his patient wouldn't want the others in the room to see. Instead, Mangroves pressed his third eye against the tyrant's cool porcelain and tightened the curl of his arms around the body. The numbers slowed down the closer they came to an end, dread like a thud and shove between his eyes, beating down through the brow of the grinning cat.

Eventually, the bubbling hiss of air grating through the bullet hole faded away. And all that remained was 126, a bundle of ribs and stilled breath in his arms.


	2. les bijoux indiscrete

It is day 49 of my incarceration. Everything hurts.

Such has become the grim mantra of my days spent here in this place just south of Eden; everything hurts. Unwelcome worries that whisper against the rims of my ears in place of the birdsong I once woke to. Paranoia lingers sluggish and heavy in the forefront of my mind in place of a once-consoling self-reflective conscience; it joins me during the morning rush or for a few moments of afternoon tea the way an infatuation once did, from forever ago.

The inside of my left knee creaks and complains like an old bronze candle sconce lodged in crumbling mortar, deep in conversation with the long burn around my right wrist, as if the two very different pains are connected by a phantom thread. Like when a pulled hair makes your nose itch. An inflamed tendon in my leg and its stiff middle toe -- healed improperly -- are stubbornly solitary hurts compared to these, each confined to tight schedules of all-encompassing throbbing or ghostly pangs. Small stargates, all of them.

I find myself more and more missing the small glow of the suburbs. The dried hydrangea petals blowing in from the yard, a smokey screen door, outdated air conditioning and a box tube resting on the golden carpet in wooden casing. The scuff of rubber hush puppies against the browning laminate. This new, whimpering nostalgia, growing stronger in the quiet half-life of my prison, perplex and indeed pain me more than my petty physical ailments because these memories are not mine. Through foreign eyes I see a woman in scuffing rubber soles begin a row with a man with one leg. She throws a meat pie into his face. I hear a wheelchair squealing over a lip of plastic in the floor separating laminate from rug, and the trickle of a leaky hose. I smell dead pine needles settled, for centuries it seems, in the old flaking wood of the back porch. Those fucking hydrangeas. I am a dancer here, I think. Ballet, perhaps. Here, too, everything hurts.

When you've been alone with yourself as long as I, you become aware of your body. And you come away from it, in a sense. Away from molding and adjusting and looking for improvement in its public presentation. I was never a pretty thing, I know, but day after day in this place I rediscover an old adoration for my organic self-propelling vessel; I am mesmerized by its pain and its strangely fervent and irrational longings; I am frightened of its terrible imaginative powers. A man very close to an untimely death looks at his hands and admires the intricacies of muscle and bone that bend his fingers in the firelight. And how dextrous, how wonderful, are they! How preciously naked and strange are our limbs, capped in enamel, velvet layers of gray on red on green and blue. As the flesh fades away I discover new vascular intricacies to trace and press with curious fingers and marvel at the beauty of man's construction. And oh, how this beauty aches.

Each day I at equal turns suppress my foreign turns of nostalgia and indulge my cravings for new lives. Devouring them over and over, picking bits of false childhoods out of my teeth. I am a sinewy old battle pilot whose profession has spoiled his body but whose travels have ignited a sharp mind. I am a builder, an over-payed idealist, a glory-obsessed anarchist, and a homicidal maniac with a reinforced bulldozer – lives as real to me as the ten toes on my feet. One of my favorites, the child who walks home from grade school to eat the snack her mother makes her, runs to check the mailbox for news of her father. Nothing. My aching subneural stargates spin lives like tangled webs over my wrinkled chameleon brain, a jungle of pitfalls and shortcomings and the occasional ray of contentment muddled up in the fibers like indiscrete jewels or plot points in the moving pictures of a theater you can never quite leave.

In fits of loneliness brought on from the turmoil of the transtemporal memory fragmentation I call boredom, I try to hail the other inmates, reach out with small notes, pages ripped from books folded small and cast out on fishing line, trying to incite a nibble from the window bars and cracks between doors and floors. I was always such a lousy shot. The feathered snake from down the hall says he's quit smoking again. The minotaur next door asks if I've got any chocolate left. And she... she asks me what hurts.


	3. mezzo cammin

In Mangroves' mind it was a minstrel show. The performers were blacked up in false colors and gaudy costumes, each wielding peculiar instrumentation with particular energy and flare. It was insulting, a mock-up of a past institution, but it was also an opportunity for the performers to put their talents on display for a bemused and wealthy audience. The minstrel show exhausted its participants by demanding the emotional labor of living through a mask, and then doubly so with the added shame of their farce; but it was a living, and sometimes, to them, it was a reality.

Not since the far away 20th century had wards operated without that fine film of humor. In the past, such institutions existed because demand necessitated them; where do we put these people, these minstrels? How do we change them into respectable citizens? Or, where do we put them so they do not bother us without over-burdening the penal system? Since then the entire operation had become a grand economic tradition, in Mangroves' opinion, a service that has evolved to produce its own demand, finding the minstrels to prolong the show. Mangroves knew it was graft, political and social, he knew the hook-clawed units sent out by the facilities to root out potential patients were wolves in wolves' clothing. Counter the evils of terrorism disguised as the evils of mental disease with specialty units disguised as doctors but acting on behalf of the ruling party.

Tricks within tricks within tricks -– this particular facility was just one thread of a larger spiderweb. Perhaps the grandest trick of all was the eventual corruption of the orchestrators. Tradition transforms punch lines into scripture; the patients were minstrels, yes, but the most enthusiastic performers were the doctors and orderlies themselves. Perhaps even the Board. You can only uphold a farce for so long before the humor and puppetry indoctrinate you, adding to the reality of the farce and feeding the traitorous loop of history.

Not that he would do anything about it. Mangroves made his living as yet another actor in the grand scheme. He wasn't so foolish as to threaten his own livelihood with paeans of justice, nor was he careless enough to yield any of his own misgivings to the thought police wandering the halls and perching on tables, dewdrops ranging along spider threads.

Mangroves tried to watch the patients the way he was supposed to, the way his colleagues did -- to let himself be charmed by the savagery of the painted minstrels, to divorce himself from their humanity and recite theory and DSM protocol as if he were a scholar or even a doctor. But each night he could not help but scrub away at the spot on his hands.

Instead Mangroves watched like a cattle herd, gentle, coaxing. His performers bayed loud and needy to each other and to their surroundings. _I'm different,_ they all screamed, _I'm different from you._

 _Do they even believe it?_ Mangroves wondered.

One spoke with an infuriating upspeak in his ear, the tail of each sentence winding upward in a piercing questioning caterwaul. He could hardly decipher the words—volcanoes? They were saying something about volcanoes. I'm just a cattle-herd, he wanted to insist, I can drive you but I can't pay you so leave me alone; entertain a more influential guest.

His eyes flicker like water clock pendulums between the herd of minstrels and the bear hiding at the center of the flock.

 _126..._ he thinks, almost triumphantly, knowing his use of the objectifying ID-handle would tickle his patient in just the wrong way, maybe just enough to provoke something. 126 stood in the pool with hands outstretched and meticulously leveled, staring blankly at the interim space as if performing complex calculations at a holographic control panel, face held in captainly consternation. Mangroves sometimes suspected his patient did strange things deliberately, to sit back and watch the performing doctors trip over themselves to draw connections between false dots. He wondered if he was doing just that, right now. Falling into a trap -- tricks within tricks.

Mangroves remembered the curt three-word assessment he'd received from the co-director of 126's summer facility: _textbook Holden Caulfield._

At first he hadn't understood that angle at all; 126's affliction seemed fiercely separate from the drab rejection of the future Dr. Seventy suggested. After his most recent conversation with his patient, carrying on well beyond his lunch hour at the _Descender_ last weekend, Mangroves revised his initial critique. 126 certainly had a hard time letting _go_ , but whether or not that was enough to diagnose a sopping existentialist he had yet to decide.

Mangroves finally diverted his analytical subwoofer when the upspeak in his ear faded away, and instead an awareness in the air caused him enough peripheral anxiety that he was forced to turn only to classify the presence as no threat before returning safely to his jeweled observation. He recognized the murmur in the air almost as soon as his eyes left the water; one of the herd, a minstrel 126 called _Haley._

It was a rather boring name, Mangroves thought, particularly given his patient's penchant for... excited utterance. He'd heard it all: the Snake, the Minotaur, a few references to a badger lord on the upper floors, and an occasional befuddling reference to the "tertiary snare," among others.

However, 126 did not maintain a detailed inventory of _everyone_ in the facility, so Mangroves turned his attention to Haley. What made this one different?

Haley was probably the same age as 126, at least in this plane. She spent considerably less time in the facility than the others; she was not a resident but a daytimer, joining the adolescent group's afternoon activities after classes and then leaving with her guardian in the evening. Her hair was frayed wire, curls plunging from a clip at her crown to stretch and bounce behind her neck. She was heavier, but not so much that the facility felt it necessary to impose a corrective routine. Her nose turned up, soft and hobbitish, and her interactions with other patients and her assigned physician were – in Mangroves’ opinion -- achingly ordinary.

“My dear,” he interrupted an endless spiel, casting around in his memory for the girl's ID-handle without success. Looping, traitorous mind.

“What do you think of,” he nodded toward the swim area where his patient stood casting about with practiced hands at the invisible control panel. “126, there?”

Mangroves realized too late his untempered candor had made her uneasy.

“Who?” She picks at a cluster of curls, not smiling, still neutral. “Oh, nice? Really. We're in the same music class.” She adds, as an afterthought: “We share snacks sometimes.”

“What do the others call 126?”

Her neutral expression further crumbles at his blunt investigative query. She lurches back. “We don’t talk.”

Mangroves watched her walk away to rejoin the edges of the outfit, trying not to appear frustrated and uncomfortable with his own performance. He should know better than to interact with patients while in a destructive mood. God forbid any of the thought police had been present to witness such deplorable tact.

“Beautiful, isn't she?”

126 was a bundle of ribs and stilled breath at his feet, squatting with bare toes squirming on the rough, moist gravel of the swim area. It was strange, 126 was not overly thin, but still had a persistent way of appearing skeletal, not in the face but in the eyes and spine. Mangroves thought maybe part of it was how white his patient was. He'd always maintained a kind of aloof awareness of skin color, a blanched echo of a ferocious race consciousness forced on him by a long line of disadvantaged ancestors. As a headstrong child he'd insisted on the ugliness of his light-skinned comrades, which evolved into an arrogant medical student's professional contempt, and now, as a harried resident doctor under brutal contract, lock and key, Mangroves observed his pale patient with an apathy diminished by a powerful personal interest in the subject. Icy membrane sloped and occasionally wrinkled over a netting of dusky purple and subtle sylvan grays. Snow-covered prairies drawn into sharp contrasts by the bright red of 126's toes and heels, fingertips, ears and eyelids.

There was a distinctly unlovely structure to his patient's face, the doctor noticed for the umpteenth time. An ungendered thickness to the eyebrows, a formless flat jawline, a heavy shadowed pout under the mouth. Mangroves wondered what previous doctors had thought of such look-away features; as he observed, the pale lips peeled back over a set of immature teeth gone translucent at the tips. And hovering over it all, the place where the eye would prefer not to look, circling the drain to prolong the inevitable, were eyes so gray and slated over with hate and hideous strength that any dialogue ended rather abruptly when it came down to eye-contact. 126 made him uneasy, Mangroves noticed, for the umpteenth time.

The dark notches of violet beneath his patient's eyes were stranger today -- naked, uglier than usual. He realized 126's glasses were probably in the locker rooms. The usual blank stare cut a little deeper and sharper than usual.

“I don't see it.” He finally responded, feeling thrust backward in time.

126 rocked back and forth, arms stacked tight around two folded beanstalk legs. Smug. “You haven't heard her sing.”

Mangroves watched as the pair of skull-cap white knees supporting his patient unfolded, darker patches with raised, dusty white scarring -- they lumped, bubbled, and strained to lift their host up from the gravel like votive congregants building a divine obelisk into the heavens. “Three whole eyes, doctor, and still you act blind. I see them there, pretty, dark, but closed. Always closed. You want to watch and watch and never learn anything. Why is that?”

126 doesn't know, Mangroves insisted. That's impossible. His traitorous mind looped, looped, looped. “And I see you've got a mouth and yet unsevered vocal chords, but all you do is lie with them.”

Finally his patient's smugness disappears, but it makes Mangroves more nervous than proud, especially when the dogwood eyes dart down -- down and over, down and over, stall, repeat -- and finally his patient stiffens. Mangroves cannot begin to fathom what animated fancy has struck his traitorous mind this afternoon. Why is he saying these things? Why is he acting with such ruthless, masochistic abandon when he knows the thought police could be around the corner taking incriminating snapshots? A single frame of his activity would probably tell a laughably prepubescent tale written in neurotransmitter balances and synapse melodies -- the truth was he would be happy never seeing 126 again. The other truth was, he didn’t always want to be happy.

Mangroves comforted himself with the assurance that the thought police have bigger fish to fry than tactless doctors; there was nothing counterrevolutionary about his boorish conversational tactics after all, although there was a slim chance he could be accused of destabilizing patients' delicate mental balances to compromise the efficacy of the state's corrective treatments. Treatments he didn’t find to be all that effective in the first place. Still, the moment he assumed his usual vantage point in the shadows outside the influence of the pool room's skylight, Mangroves had sat back in numb horror while his inner monologue twisted and crashed out of his control, a runaway train spitting black smoke to the barred heavens.

Perhaps the last updates to his chip hadn't taken, but he couldn't imagine the effects would be so abrupt and debilitating.

“Keep thinking you've got a colony inside my head, doctor. But you're a stranger in your own. You wouldn’t know a lie from me if you were flat on your back.”

Mangroves endures a new bizarre thought that he would give anything to know precisely what happens in 126's mind in the spaces between their conversations, but doubted an attempt at colonization would be successful. He imagined it would turn out a bit like the American Roanoke mystery. Sure, it was in his job description to investigate his patients' mental habitat (and sometimes, it was his job to pretend there was something worth investigating in order to justify the incarceration of a youth), but nine times out of ten it was a long boring walk through conflated contradictions: innumerable cases of independent thought challenging the ruling party, and a one in ten chance the patient was simply too rife with terrors and abstraction to really begin hammering away without the proper tools.

“When did you hear Haley sing?”

A flat stare. 126 clasps each elbow in one cold-reddened hand. The doctor wishes to God his patient would put the corrective lenses back on, and spare him the direct force of each dogwood brown eye.

“Why did you do that to your lip?” He ended up asking, blandly.

“They put the holes there, Mangroves. I only filled them.”

He found _that_ scenario highly implausible. Barbed horseshoes cut darkly through his patient’s pouty lip, dancing under the movements of a tongue still fascinated by the titanium additions. Granted leave of the facility once a month and that was what 126 did with the time: running off to self-mutilate in some splicer’s dingy stall. 500 cens in government play-money.

“Perhaps you can get fitted with a bridle next.” He quipped.


	4. tenir le coup

In the new facility, I must meet once a week with the cruel Dr. Mangroves. Mangroves models the sessions like tête-à-têtes between polite strangers, but I am not fooled by this professional facade. Psychiatrists are sultans here. And in the office numbered 237 Mangroves sits enthroned in a great _iwan_ of desk ornaments and framed achievements, a Babylonian citadel overcome and emptied of value -- desert winds raze and howl, picking at Mangroves' uncertain silhouette like tamed hellhounds. The image of the doctor set before this elaborate portal delivering justice and collecting dues appeals greatly to me; I feel one of my past lives resonate. It is as if we have met before, at least once, and I have judged the doctor's character therewith appropriately.

Today a woman sits behind Mangroves, perched on a small table like a potted plant, clutching the tallest coffee I've ever seen in her manicured nails.

“One-dollar coffee Wednesday,” she whispers loudly, noticing my glance.

I am never given her name, and Mangroves never acknowledges her, but of course Mangroves would never deign to acknowledge someone who has managed to slip behind the desk into the Great Iwan. And I am not so affected as to believe she is an apparition, so her presence is fascinating, if not so much her appearance or character -- she is just distracting enough to make the weekly session taste quite different. The winds are not so vehement, so harsh. I can't smell the heat and dust on Mangroves' skin quite as strongly as usual. And when I nod off briefly during the doctor's routine psychological assessment, she catches my gaze and offers a knowing smile.

“Are you with me?”

I jerk awake, back to the desert. Boy, it's beautiful. And demanding. Like a library burned down a long time ago. The Bear drifts into my peripheral vision but I shrug it off along with the psychopathic defiance to authority it brings.

“Why do you ask?”

The upper half of Mangroves' face is a bounded universe, demonically unmoving, but the doctor's tongue darts out to worry at a developing cold sore.

“Let's continue. Tell me about your good citizenship exams. I understand they injected this year’s participants with a series of job placement probes -- did anything interest you in a professional capacity?”

“The ruling party is looking for a purveyor of concubines.”

“A serious answer, please.” The _tap-tap_ of a ballpoint threat. “Another tick for insubordination and the Board will put you back on scopolamine-X.”

“The big pink ones?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. The JAG Corps probe tickled me.”

“Splendid. How did you feel about working for the Army?”

“We do not work for the Army.” I said, they said, we said. “We accept military funding because there is no alternative; justice, like interstellar space, has been declared a public resource – meaning government _reg_ ulated, meaning private channels of investment are closed, exploration and innovation are officially incorporated.”

“You have some grievance against state-controlled goods?”

“The ruling party are state-controlled _pigs_ getting fat on their own excrement.”

“So, nothing in particular, then?”

“Do I need to be told how to separate sheep from goats? Does anyone?”

Mangroves sighs, hard and long-suffering. “Let’s quiet down and get back on track. Your exams, 126.”

“I was studying extraterrestrial fusion power systems and ambient plasma wave propulsion. We’ve made great strides in the last century -- ”

“Now hang on,” The pen _tap-tap_ s, unsurprised, unyielding. “What does that have to do with the practice of law?”

“I’m talking about astrophysics.”

“These are two very specialized professions. You must have received a defective probe.”

“Then whose idea was it, probing a defective mind?”

“The good citizenship exams are designed to measure your ability to cope with society. Surely you understand your scores are critical, should I ever bargain with the Board for your release. Are you still listening?”

The Bear belches loudly and begins weathering the intricate designs on the insides of the Great Iwan with one long claw, not looking for weaknesses exactly but looking to leave marks. Evidence.

“Well?”

“What?”

“All you have to do is answer the questions, 126.”

“Call me something else. When can I go back to the university? I was in the middle of earning my doctorate, and your guards took all my literature -- what am I going to do here without Chaucer?” 

The woman inside the _iwan_ takes a drink of her coffee, avoids my eyes.

“Tell me about your studies, then.”

“I had a job at the little zoo. We just got six new rescues for the bonobo enclosure, two were illegal pets, the others illegal circus. They had names but we named them all again. Herbie Tarbottom knows thirty-seven different hand-signs.”

“And your PhD?”

“I don't have a PhD.”

“I see. And these… bonobos, you found this to be fulfilling work?”

I know what is coming; I feel it ethereally but not altogether consciously, the way you might wake up in a windowless room with a good idea of what the weather’s like outside. The Bear huffs, shuffles, and falls around me. I feel its heavy weight on my shoulders as surely as the heart in my chest, silver in my teeth. My fingers and toes freeze and grow numb as the Bear radically alters my perception of homeostasis. It hates Mangroves.

I wonder for the cheap thrill of a passing extra-societal thought what it would be like to tear the doctor's throat out. I could do it. I could rip apart the propriety that protects Mangroves in Room 237, the barrier of professionalism that everyone believes protects doctors from patients. I want to strip the apathy from Mangroves, leverage my nails beneath the soft skin blanket and peel the goldenrod cartilage from the meat. I want to expose the regal arch of its spine. The thick pelt shivers into existence along my arms and I am hurting and cold and righteous and berserk with unnatural urges; _I COULD DO IT YOU KNOW_ is the only message I want Mangroves to receive, the only true answer to the unasked questions. I rise from my prison, bones snapping and popping into place --

A static blanket settles softly over my hindbrain, a sudden and foreign nudge of instinct that forces my eyes from Mangroves' sable throat in favor of seeking out the potted plant in the corner. The woman appears to be deep in conversation with the rim of her cup, but her throat -- the inevitable focus of the Bear's ponderings -- gives her away. The ream of muscle running perpendicular to her jawline is still, poised almost, not at all busy with the undulations of swallowing expected of one so focused.

She is thought police.

The recoil is swift; a quick rustle and a low hedging moan accompany the Bear on its interdimensional trip back to the collective unconscious hindbrain, where it will lurk and bite at its feet until the urge to mark and destroy reaches it again. I wonder if the woman is registered, or an independent contractor with the new facility.

Down the road, a few twists and turns and electrical pulseways from my hindbrain home, is a threeway junction at the temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes, and there, within the snowy settlement of the cerebral cortex, a small ice-fishing neighborhood called the gyrus. A perverse economy of empathy thrives there, a humble kingdom of pushovers and martyrs fighting with open hands against my logical, human egocentrism. Evolution rewarded my ancestors' dog-eating-dog, one-for-one survivalism, but somewhere along the way, by some mutant fluke, it also rewarded the peculiar function of the gyrus. Like lanterns in the fog of my arrogant self-preservation, empathy burns lights into my eyes and turns them on poor Mangroves, witnesses the sad spiral galaxies of past lives in the doctor's eyes, reduced to nautilus shell trinkets by forgetfulness. I pity the doctor for forgetting the fabulous past. Anyone left in the dark of themselves would be understandably lost and confused by the lingering emotional pulsars of so many lives left behind.

Sunlight corkscrews through the shade. Sparks snatch blades of color off the _iwan_ , I hear windchimes chattering about marketplaces, fresh figs and olive groves, the musty smell of camel pastures, dust on the road from Alexandria. Sultan, or sheikh, I once thought, but perhaps not. Someone untitled but sovereign in a land of blood and sun. Mangroves had known the ruthless self-gratification of the autocrat, and the loneliness of a god.

I realized the Bear hated Mangroves because we were so very different. The doctor's golden hourglass sands and deep candlelit shadows were at odds with my frozen whites and grays. But the ice-fishers are always willing to turn a profit.

The decay rate of the doctor’s samsara is extraordinary -- a quick downward glide, pitiful as Icarus. From djinn to king to counselor, palaces to temples to apothecaries, schoolhouses, and finally, to Room 237. Mangroves' particular sadness was warped and matted by many ages of steady decline from power.

“Like Khan.”

“Hm?”

“Shere Khan, the Bengal terror, the skinless tiger.”

A little feline curve of the doctor's mouth, a little glimmer in the nautilus shells reminiscent of their former glory. “And who are you supposed to be?”

“Berserk, doctor. That's where you come in.”

I am glad she stopped me with her gentle influence. I would never have noticed the thought police, the woman whose throat quivers in the shadow of her one-dollar coffee. I would not have met Mangroves and felt the suspicion and hatred built between us over many lives, and I would not have mediated our chance meeting in this jungle with the compromising economic forethought of the gyrus. Without her brief distraction, I know we would have torn each other apart, like animals, or spiral galaxies on a collision course, each troubled by the immensity and certainty of their fate and willing to die, if only for the cheap thrill.


	5. desiderium

There's a rot on my teeth these days, creeping up from my gums like black sesame shells. I leer in the mirror kind of proudly, hoping the other inmates will see.

She twinkles above me, and I fight and slosh against the tides, hoping to twinkle back. And how dare I, the petty tramp, reach out? yearn to see but not be looked upon? swing my reap at her serene self renewal, a jealous mortal at odds with the undying truth: the truth, that I was in love with a broken memory.

Shame burns me, and a guilt so strong it is the only thing I know surely is my own; unlike my archival remnants of past and petty traumas, it is _enduring_. It exposes a lingering vesper of self-love that wishes to see itself as something hurting and wounded in order to justify an animal despair. And the shame endures despite objective psychological dissection because after ten-thousand years I find I am that same animal, believing itself to be both great and girdled, immaculate and weathered, tried, trounced but resurrected.

Again and again she weighs me on the scales and finds a begging scarcity, tells me thus not in the manner of the cold courier, knowing that would destroy me, but rather the passing emissary -- a sympathetic stranger wielding great power: an intimate knowledge of my being, my non-human person, mortal substrate. My fingers are cold outside of their skin, pressing deeply into my eyes.

Rage and power, once so willing and docile at my fingertips, crumble at my exterior like so much shoddy mortar. Emotion, that old approximation of form. I am trapped in costume, putting on airs for a bemused audience. The Self is a temple, but soil seeps into the cracks where it lies, belly in the dirt, surrounded by both predator and prey.

How I wish we could leave this world, she and I, leave the relentless click and clatter of the age of technology and live like daydreaming children, studying and reading together somewhere warm and windy, balancing checkbooks and killing boars for experience points. The moon amid the sea would lap at our feet, the full tapestry of sky between our toes, and I would bring her oranges from the cloudless dawn, wishing her a full, sweet life. But it was my dream, and I suppose I traded it all for her happiness.

If only I were something mysterious and eye-catching enough that she could need me too.

But I am too much of a selfish coward to let go in the quiet way she separated herself from me. Instead I kick and howl behind the walls she left me, desperate in my mortal search for the abstract and everlasting. In the quietest moments between episodes, I return to my empty dream of wind and water. To gaze at the sickle shape she paints in my stars, a constellation unaware of its small acolytes below. I was björn to her, long-dead warrior hiding behind the skin of a beast far nobler and more rightfully arrogant than I, I, I -- a two-dimensional projection of wrath and apathy. Ten-thousand years of berserker devotion to a false god. Mortality lost its glamor in repetition. 

As my incarceration wears on, I feel every ounce of poetry in my see-through skin leave me like that last doughnut hole at the bottom of the bag, a husk of fatty crumble spilling its only marketed skill to the floor of its prison. There's a blossom in the crumbling plaster at the exact level my eyes rest when I'm taking a shit, and I worried over that spot for months before finally moving on to another one to refresh the view. So take my full meaning when I say every spot on these walls has been pulled apart and reconstructed perfectly on the insides of my eyelids. I have been far too long in this monotony. I'm tired easily. A faceless worry gnaws at my stomach lining and pinches at my throat. I spend days feeling alternatively corn-husked, then zitty and overfilled, on my toes and ready to dip, fingers like claws like hairpin triggers. I'm fucking sick of this confinement, but the two roads out are strictly circuits back to suffering.

My fingers and toes are so damn cold. As if a skin were pulled over my body and unable to reach my most dexterous extremities. So like a dumb animal I compose eulogies for my suffering skin and serenades for my distant lover, paeans for her godly guises.

In the new facility, the budding morning silence -- and indeed, the afternoon, evening, and thoroughly ripened nighttime silence -- is marred by the opening and closing of portals: doors that pinch and freckle the walls of the sterile labyrinth. They open with metallic clicks and groans, close with snaps and clatters and echoing punches. At first the unpredictable, entropic nature of the noise is grating, a German clock trying to spit out a tough, scratchy tune. But soon, the constant churning and beating song of the labyrinth becomes purposeful. It is a needle sliding over waxen grooves in a graphophone cylinder, a little worn with age and misuse, but undoubtedly a mechanism with form and direction. The bleating clock was a nuisance, the graphophone a cyclical bore. Finally, after a few months of the same routine, the noise fades as all noises do into a new silence, and slowly, the inhabitants of the labyrinth forget. There are no doors, no portals, no ways in, no ways out.

It was that morning I'd wished to send out a probe. Anything, a satellite, a drone, a dramatic panning camera mounted on a helicopter or a goddamned letter on fishing line, anything to show  
that the world  
was bigger  
than all  
of this.  
The once not quite charming but at least entertaining microcosm that was the new facility had become a moratorium. Static and stifling, the windowless white walls wounded with white noise and medical wherewithal were the bars to great change and opportunity. I imagined that beyond the wall there was paradise, or at least some of paradise's forgotten fruit. I had memories from outside of the labyrinth, memories not my own but nonetheless compelling and real, memories which promised _betterness_ on the outside. I remembered running water, reading nooks, sleeping hounds, I remembered a particular angle of sunlight slanting through middle class households on Sunday afternoons, and convent cellars that reeked of casserole. I remembered industry and progress, but most of all, I remembered an _outside_. I know now that these were the delusions of a dithering idealist, illusions; there is nothing outside the moratorium. There is no better place, no brighter future, and no afterlife. Time was plodding on in the facility, but it turned no corners and offered no refuge. The present is dismal, yes, but it is what you make of it and no more.

But at the time, I was trapped. I was trapped and there were people keeping me here inside the worried white walls.

The Bear checked its fingers that morning to be sure they weren't broken.

No matter how I peeled and pried at the ridged skin over my ribs it never became familiar. It moved in the mirror but not the way I was moving. It didn't breathe right, didn't draw the right contours under the fluorescent lighting. It wasn't _mine_. The more logical conclusion was an abnormality in the mirror. My attempts to clean it with the sleeve of my standard issue sleepclothing warped the surface with oils and dust and swept personalized images -- planted on me by the laughing Board -- to the floor. Images like photos: snapshots lined in white of friends and classmates, printed words intended to impersonate sentimental value. There were game cards with white well-worn wrinkles and cracks, a single tarot from the Rider-Waite deck. The items littered the laminate like old lies, forgotten by both parties but their lives prolonged by lingering emotion, independent, sourceless.

Not looking but feeling the paper lies whispering under my toes was infuriating, and my frustration with the mirror grew to a frenzy, lined like another snapshot with a white border of creeping terror. _WHO ARE YOU_ the unfamiliar creature seems to scream from the glass, skin crawling and mutinous. A vertical red line crawls up its throat and matching capillary brambles bloom in the white of its right eye.

It was... almost me, mostly.

...Then.

Didn't hear the graphophone stutter in time, didn't register the door snapping open as outside the usual white noise. The Bear's rage was so complete it didn't feel the activation of the Manx as the thought police wrestled me from the planes. Red fell like a curtain. Like in the Goldeneye video games, after you get shot a couple times, and blood wipes out your screen.


End file.
